List of points

The Cross on your breast?… Very good. But the Cross on your shoulders, the Cross in your flesh, the Cross in your mind. Only then will you live for Christ, with Christ and in Christ; only then will you be an apostle.

Apostolic soul: first of all, yourself. Our Lord has said, through Saint Matthew: 'When the day of Judgment comes, many will say to me: "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, work many miracles in your name?" Then I shall tell them to their faces: "I have never known you; away from me, you evil men"'.

God forbid — says Saint Paul — that I, who have preached to others should myself be rejected.

The military mind of Saint Ignatius has left us a picture of the devil calling up innumerable demons and scattering them through nations, provinces, towns and villages, after a 'sermon' in which he exhorts them to fasten their chains and fetters on the world, leaving not a single person unbound…

You have told me that you want to be a leader; and what good is a leader in chains?

Look: the apostles, for all their evident and undeniable defects, were sincere, simple… transparent.

You too have evident and undeniable defects. May you not lack simplicity.

There is a story of a soul who, on saying to our Lord in prayer, 'Jesus, I love you', heard this reply from heaven: 'Love means deeds, not sweet words.'

Think if you also could deserve this gentle reproach.

Apostolic zeal is a divine craziness I want you to have. Its symptoms are: hunger to know the Master; constant concern for souls; perseverance that nothing can shake.

Don't rest on your laurels. If, humanly speaking, that attitude is neither comfortable nor becoming, what will it be when — as now — the laurels are not really yours, but God's?

You have come to the apostolate to submit, to annihilate yourself: not to impose your own personal viewpoints.

Never be men or women of long action and short prayer.

Try to live in such a way that you can voluntarily deprive yourself of the comfort and ease you wouldn't like to see in the life of another man of God.

Remember that you are the grain of wheat the Gospel speaks of. If you don't bury yourself and die, there will be no harvest.

Be men and women of the world, but don't be worldly men and women.

Don't forget that unity is a sign of life: to disunite means putrefaction — a clear sign of being a corpse.

Contempt and persecution are blessed signs of divine predilection, but there is no proof and sign of predilection more beautiful than this: to pass unnoticed.